Andrew Schenker

The modern-day sections with Mariel Hemingway, while detailing the redemptive promise of the title, too often come across as either indulgent time-filler or overflow with PSA-level superficiality.

The film smartly avoids the sort of cynical hijinks that characterize the majority of Vegas-set flicks, though it can't come up with anything more compelling to place in its stead.

Ralph Fiennes's film feels not so much rooted in the past as it is mired in conventions about how to portray that past.

The film scores all of its thematic points early, commenting intriguingly, if ultimately rather obviously, on the demands of Japanese patriarchy.

Is an exploration of sex addiction, in all its different manifestations, the new flavor of the week in contemporary American cinema?

When Diana's fixations begin to take over, Fidell seems ill-prepared to steer the film into strictly psychological territory, resulting in a project that loses its fraught sense of control at the same moment as its embattled protagonist.

The film rarely takes us past its rather obvious conclusions about the potential bestial nature of kids and how that may translate to the larger battlefields.

Walks a fine line between empathetic treatment of its characters and voyeuristic freakshow gazing.

For all of the director's willingness to explore his characters' unexpected depths, he's still hamstrung by his perpetually tasteful cinema-of-quality aesthetic.

Much of the film's attempted laughs come from the comedy-of-discomfort school, with an endless array of situations that milk awkwardness to a degree that makes these scenes far more unpleasant than humorous to watch.

Essentially the film aims to trade in the awkwardness of teen sexuality, but too often settles for the gross-out gag instead.

The movie aims for an admirable balance, but fatally upsets that equilibrium in its hurried resolutions.

Enjoyment of Jeff Kaplan's film will vary given your capacity to simultaneously laugh and wink at the hijinks of two of the least palatable characters to share screen time in recent years.

The alignment with Herman's perspective, even as it never downplays the gravity of his crimes, leads the film into a set of obvious conclusions.

The film seldom pushes beyond the bare-minimum dictates of the thriller, only rarely offering up a memorable action sequence.

All of this could be very funny, but while the film does deliver some strong comic turns, far too much time is spent watching an inactive Kofman whining about his lot.

Even as Deb comes to embrace the vibrancy of urban life, she's still prey to a blinkered suburban viewpoint which becomes inscribed in the film itself.

The characters never sound like they're actually talking to one another, but rather delivering Jeff Lipsky's echo-chamber monologues.

For all the revelations about the way the rich operate, there's little juicy pleasure to be had in the proceedings.

Allen Hughes may suggest an air of pretty menace, but he does little to make the sequence work as a legible genre scene.

This twist-heavy World War II drama would play as an absurdist comedy if the director wasn't so dead set on excluding just about any trace of humor from his self-serious project.

The film is too tepid in its treatment of its central character and her situation to generate any real emotive charge.

The film is somewhat flimsy, tinged with the impulse to make the elderly characters just the right amount of ridiculous for the benefit of younger viewers.

Undeniably rousing, but deeply irresponsible, Argo fans the flames surrounding historical events likely to still remain raw in the memory of many viewers.

Jason Moore's film is more or less successful in inverse proportion to the degree that it plays its material by the book.

Fitfully engaging, but the documentary turns into a touchy-feely isn't-it-wonderful-we're-all-saved love fest as soon as the universalists begin to dominate the interview segments.

A half-hearted morality tale about taking responsibility for your actions as a sign of impending maturity.

Nancy Savoca's film begins in caricature and ends in sentimentality, only briefly hitting the sweet spot in between.

Class privilege and sexual politics are inextricably linked in Trishna, Michael Winterbottom's blunt, self-consciously brutal, and rather loose updating of Thomas Hardy's "Tess of the D'Urbervilles."

What saves the film from being simply a schematic mother-daughter reconciliation drama is both the reluctance and prickliness that Catherine Keener brings to her character.

The film is far too indulgent with its lead character to do more than hint at the ways that one form of male egotism can morph into another.

Suffers from both an odd, ineffective structure and a low-key tone that jars uncomfortably with the subject matter and makes the film's stakes seem unnecessary low.

Both an informative bit of agitprop and an ultra slick and slightly self-satisfied bit of entertainment.

While everything here is mostly unspoken, and the film itself hints at a broader set of concerns than simply two lost souls meeting on foreign ground, Here too often feels like a jumble of ideas that don't quite cohere.

For the most part, this is a boys-will-be-boys movie that excuses everything its pair of protags do in the name of some sort of cosmic order.

It's all fairly by the numbers, but in Boeken's presentation, the film isn't without its moments of narrative power.

Joseph Cedar's Footnote is a sour, rather unpleasant affair that hinges on acts of Jews behaving badly.

Less concerned with rendering the specifics of its setting (a small Maori town on the New Zealand coast) than in calling on bouts of whimsy and superficial cultural signifiers to approximate the headspace of its central characters.

The film wisely avoids giving its material a large-scale epic quality it can't sustain, but it also results in a project that lacks the complexity to register as more than a handsome little sketch.

Fails to dig too deep into the politics or inner workings of the new right-wing youth movement it profiles, remaining content with simplistic conclusions about pro-Putin thuggery.

Rather than bringing out the symbolic inner lives of the characters, these sequences seem like the intrusion of an aggressive authorial personality on a film whose subject-as well as the fact of Har'el's outsider status-demands that the filmmaker simply sit back and observe.

Steven Meyer's documentary treads a middle ground between illumination and cheap waterworks.

Offers up little more than a tired morality play about the dangers of power, rehashing stale insights about the narcissism of the documentary impulse.

This film has too many weak, unconnected strands (what's the subplot about the narrator's father doing here anyway?), too much overtly expositional dialogue, and too unfocused a narrative to really cohere. And then there's that whole matter of expendable whores.

A typically anodyne rom-com given a certain poignant piquancy by the paralyzing shyness of its romantic leads.

The Rum Diary, Bruce Robinson's amorphous hodgepodge of a film, wants to be many things: period recreation, social commentary, morality play, romance, an insider look at the newspaper game.

The relationship between the two leads neither deteriorates nor seriously improves and last-minute romantic developments don't so much as give shape to the narrative as play as perfunctory gestures of closure.

Joan aside, the film goes down easy enough.

3 is a smidgeon film. Take a smidgeon of scientific/ethical discussion, throw in a pinch of dance/poetry/dream sequences, tie the whole thing up with split-screen montages and you no longer just have a film about a love triangle, but a Godardian objet d'art.

Only Jackie Chan, in a comedic supporting role as a Zen-trained cook who applies his culinary techniques on the battlefield (he "stir-fries" one enemy in a giant pot and "kneads" another like dough), provides any measure of relief.

The film lacks the immediacy of the Dardenne brothers' pictures, the electrifying sense that anything might happen, while also avoiding their penchant for redemptive resolutions.

The film is less corporate parable than intricately crafted revenge drama whose intensively detailed plotting can't hide the fact that the whole thing seems like a lot of work for a glaringly modest payoff.

The first four of the film's 1980s-set episodes are shorter in length and more anecdotal in nature than the last two and deal primarily with the pageantry and inflexible customs behind the regime with a perspective at once amused and bemused.

Of the film's three principals, it's only teenage Michael--more than ably embodied by screen newcomer Harmony Santana--that writer-director Rashaad Ernesto Green seems to have much of a feel for.

This schizophrenic conception of Gosling's character is indicative of the film's largely dichotomous view of romantic relationships.

This is one film that's overly reliant on a dubious central symbol, schematically employed.

To drive home the pathos of Nim's mistreatment, James Marsh frequently makes questionable use of the creature's apparent similarity to human beings, trading complex analysis for easy sentiment.

Battle for Brooklyn brings up larger quandaries about urban development which it doesn't begin to address.

Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon's shtick - a relentless verbal sparring comprised of dueling impressions, poetry recitations, absurdist riffing, and comic one-upmanship - works best in small doses.

It's all very tastefully handled by Ben Sombogaart, shot in plenty of staid compositions whose denuded color scheme suggests a historical remove, but it rarely generates any heat, even during a pair of graphic, but not particularly erotic sex scenes.